KNOT

lyrics by Henk Hofstede

Ultramarine

So many colours in my head

Ultramarine extra fine and white lead

The London fog is falling down

On the bridges of Westminster and Waterloo 

The London rain is falling down inside my head

The bell boy and the chambermaid

Found sheets of paper in the Savoy rooms

20 DOLLAR BILLS   BASEMENT  WIND BLOWS  WRITE BRAILLE

With my left eye, everything is red

With my right eye, everything is blue

In my paradise with my fading  eyes

I paint the water lilies while the soldiers die

What a waste

Let’s roll out the red carpet for the skeleton army

I don’t see red anymore, I see blue

I remember very well how it was

So many colours in my head

Ultramarine extra fine, white lead

What a waste

The Delta Works

Aunt Eleonore is walking through the shadows

Aunt Eleonore is talking to the flowers and the birds and the trees

Aunt Eleonore is walking through the house

She said: ‘Don’t look back behind your shoulder to the cracks in our fading love

With our dissappearing homemade serenades’

Aunt Eleonore, she is an astronaut from Tirol

A lady of the canyon with a Russian TV

All the family paintings were drowning in ‘53 in the dark black sea

And when the road is getting thinner and life is getting smaller

Love is hurting like diamonds

I was the green meadow and he was the dark black sea

Now there’s a ghost standing behind every tree

I am here with you, I stay, I stay

When we get older as the years go by

Like varnish on a painting that’s cracking like the soil of a desert

Tears will fall on a piece of paper, paint me a river where I can swim

Draw me a city, where I can walk in the streets of my youth

Will the Delta Works protect us from the waves and the water

But they cannot protect us from personal disaster and matters of love

And boredom and melancholy or depression

A piece of paper

When we’re walking, we get older

When we stop, we die

The Concrete House  

I inherited the house when my mother died

I am an only child, no brothers, no sisters, no animals

My father has built this house for the family in 1968

A concrete house with one floor and a little garden in the shade

Now it hurts when I open the door

On the diving board of the swimming pool in the autumn rain

JUMP!

I cannot jump

My mother is watching

Will she save me when I drown

And I fall  

I can swim, in my life

All these years

‘Why are you leaving?’

‘That’s wanderlust’

There’s a woman in England who fills an empty house with concrete

And takes off the walls and the roof like you peel an orange

What’s left is the memory of the house in the shape of a block of concrete

For the first time, for the last time

I open the door

The Garden Center

Dear mother, take my eyes in your hand

And walk me to your promised land in the garden center

Because you always went there

The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost are gone to the Christmas sale

80 % off  Mother Mary

With a rain cap

Your head is suddenly pink

We walk in the streets of my youth

Boy in a tree   

Mother said : ‘I’m falling to pieces like my porcelain teacups 

On the white tiles of the kitchen floor’

You said :’I am almost crying like a river but flowers need some rain

I will never leave without a rain cap’

We sit down next to the coffee machine between the dwarfs of porcelain

And a waterfall on the rococo chairs, the plastic rococo chairs

With a handkerchief and peppermint waiting for the day to end

Violas in your shopping bag

In Liverpool in the rain I hear a mother say to her son :

‘Let’s look at the Lego again’   

Life never ends, like a flower it bends

Life never ends

My viola

The Blue Car

Highway

White lines

White clouds behind the trees

I drive in my blue car

A bright day comes to an end

Sunlight in my eyes

In my blue car

A raindrop is falling on my window       

A raindrop

A little screen

How can I see you there

With your pretty face and your pretty eyes

How can I see you

Raindrops like mercury

a blue car in the rain on a highway

It started with rain on the roof

I was a highway

It started with mercury drops

How can I see you there

With your pretty face and your pretty eyes

how can I see you

Machine Machine

Machine Machine you’re talking  in my sleep

The yellow bees are flying through the library

Around the books and magazines on the honey shelves

Machine Machine  you’re talking in my sleep

There’s a rusty flower falling from an iron tree

Bees on the ventilators turning round

A beautiful girl is dropping a shopping list with oranges,

Cereals and nuts on the library floor

I talk to the girl with the pearl earring

And I tell her she looks like a famous Dutch painting

Look at her       Rank Xerox   

Look at her       blue Apple            Sprechblase

Look at the numbered shelves for Winter Trees    

Look at the honey shelves for Winter Trees

She is dreaming in another language        Weisheitszahn

She takes off her glasses and she is looking like a movie star

The library girl is walking around like Monica Vitti in the Deserto Rosso

Look at the books, look at the magazines, look at the iron tree talking in my sleep

Machine Machine I’m talking in my sleep

There’s a yellow flower falling from the orange tree

Machine Machine I’m talking in my sleep

Look at the Rank Xerox                                Print my dream

She is dreaming in another language          Weisheitszahn

Dead Rat Ball

Keeping the dead alive

He’s cutting the day with a knife  (a blue envelope)

Painting the secret wars

He told me I about the danger of a dead balloon

Drinking with a stranger in the red saloon of the Kursaal

In this sea sick town

Dead end streets drown in the water and the waves

Perfume bottles  croquettes de crevettes

The boutiques with the plastic flowers

Snow globes of Marvin Gay

Ensor waves goodbye in the waves

Playing the harmonium 8 hours a day

Skeletons rattle like a castanets in battles we forget      

Dancing at the Dead Rat Ball               

Quick quick slow in the claire de lune   

Solitude, mystery and silence

Snow is falling in a snow globe

Perfume bottle in a window

Sometimes you sleep

Sometimes you keep me waiting

Now I see you waving goodbye

Keeping the dead alive

The Electric Pond

Already knows 

She already knows what day it is

But sometimes the envelope waits inside a letterbox    for years

On the frozen pond outside the concrete cabin, the snow is falling  

The tracks of skaters disappear

Am I sleeping 

I am walking on the ice

Echo Lake,  the Milky Way

All my five senses

Following the frozen wires in the electric pond

All my senses

A girl is skating on a pond

The black ice is a screen

Birds in the trees

My reflection disapears on the ice   

Une petite Allumette 

Où va le temps?                       
Une petite allumette dans le béton

Music Box with Ballerina

She is so beautiful and mean

My God, I wish that she was dead

I am so afraid of you

I hate you

I saw you   

In the office downtown

The assistants are wearing brown and black H & M dresses

She is wearing a Dries van Noten overcoat

And a Stella McCartney yellow submarine bag 

Am I walking too slow

Am I talking too fast

When I’m walking with you

We walk inside another dimension

Smiling  Mona Lisa

You’re so beautiful and mean

Like a flower in a forest that is eating flying insects

With her silver hairpin and other sharp objects

Sometimes I feel like a marble stone in a graveyard

In a coffin I am buried  alive,  knocking

Pretty ballerina

A pirouette machine

(Un) Happy Hologram

Hello! I’m a spirit , almost a ghost

Hello! I’m a spirit, hello and goodbye

I do I do I do I do I do look like my father  

A happy man

So I heard the stories in my head oh

That he was happy, that he was unhappy

Every day, all the time

I had no moving picture of my father

I saw us, happy in a car

Where are you now?    

Inside my computer there’s a thing         

There’s a thing called Happy Hologram

Where he is walking, where he is talking

So happy in my computer

Where he was born a happy boy

Happy Birthday

Happy Hologram

My hologram dad

Happy and sad